11 Web Series to Heat Up Your Summer (Plus a Few to Avoid)

Burning Love is just one of many fun online shows that can help get TV addicts through the summer.

Watch:
7 Minutes in Heaven

True to the show's title, each episode of 7 Minutes in Heaven is only a few minutes long, but those precious minutes with Saturday Night Live writer Mike O'Brien in his closet (like the interlude above with Tina Fey) are almost always pure gold.

Watch: A Day in the Life

Delivering exactly what the title promises, Hulu's original show A Day in the Life takes snapshots of interesting people living their day-to-day lives.

Watch: Spoilers

Watch: Chris Hardwick's All-Star Celebrity Bowling

Many things on Chris Hardwick's Nerdist YouTube channel are worth your time, but celebrities bowling against geeks, like in the above match against the crew from Mad Men, is perfection.

Watch: American Hipster Presents

Based on the title, it would be easy to write off this web series as hipster BS. Don't. American Hipster Presents delves into pretty fun scenes in very cool towns, like rolling with the Bon Vivants in San Francisco (above).

Watch: AEZ Presents on BlackBoxTV

This series, curated by CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker, started last month with the intriguing, 15-minute-long, Frankenstein-esque cop tale Reawakening, so there's a chance more good things are coming. However, not everything on BlackBoxTV has proven to be as compelling (see the titles marked "Avoid," elsewhere in our gallery).

Watch: Dirty Work

Not only can you watch this series about a homicide clean-up crew, you can have Dirty Work text and call you.

Watch: #nitTWITS

Quick-hit videos created from the tweets of comedians? See you next Tuesday ... because we'll be watching this all night long.

Watch: Epic Meal Time

A bunch of guys who can seriously put away food make massive meals and then scarf them with abandon. Food Network has nothing on this.

Watch: Vice Videos

For years, the crew at Vice has been documenting dark corners of the world. Now they've made a YouTube channel where viewers can take in the best of their reporting in concise chunks.

Questionable: Daybreak

Here's the thing: Daybreak has a lot of potential. It's a tech-y sci-fi-ish thriller show by Heroes producer Tim Kring (its tied to his show Touch). The production is slick as all get-out and the performances are solid. But Daybreak is also branded content – part of its purpose is to show off AT&T products and services. So while the show may be enjoyable, be prepared for copious product placement.

Avoid: The Cartoon Hangover Channel

The Cartoon Hangover channel sounds promising – quick-hit bits of comedy in the form of crude cartoons – but so far the offerings like "Lulinternet Can Suck It" (above) haven't really delivered the funny.

Avoid: Max Movie Reviews

Another offering from the American Hipster channel, though not nearly as good as Presents, Max Movie Reviews is a series of movie reviews usually given by a hipster baby ("hipster" because he wears glasses and vests, get it?). The hipster baby talks in a pseudo-German accent, and even if his insights are occasionally on point, his act is not cute.

Avoid: You Suck at Photoshop

Back in 2008, the goofy web videos of You Suck at Photoshop were a fun little goof. They even won Webbys. But now the series, while still occasionally funny, has largely lost its magic.

Avoid: The Assorted Offerings of BlackBoxTV

While Reawakening, mentioned earlier in this post, shows promise, a lot of the other content on horror/sci-fi YouTube channel BlackBoxTV is a mixed bag. For example, Final Exit (above), starts out looking like a it could be a cool zombie tale. Then it ends. And it's "gotcha!" plot twist doesn't really getcha at all.

Now that summer is here and most TV shows have wrapped for the year, it would seem that the season is upon us to go into that big beautiful place known as “outside” — or at least stroll through it long enough to get to a movie theater.

But guess what? This is the internet age! You can stay inside all year long and always have something to look at on your boob tube (or laptop, or smartphone). A surging wave of original web programming should keep couch potatoes safely ensconced until fall.

Summer Web TV Watch List
We’ve compiled a summer watch list in the gallery above: Some of the shows are quick hits that last only a few minutes, while others are closer to the traditional half-hour TV program. Check out our suggestions of programs to hold TV addicts over until the fall — along with a few warnings about web offerings you should avoid.

“Web programming” these days doesn’t mean what it used to — a bunch of kids with camcorders and homemade sets. Now that the likes of Hulu and Yahoo are serving up original programming, there are plenty of top-notch shows in the mix, often fronted by big names you already know who are now enjoying the long leash that the web provides.

Take, for example, Burning Love, which premieres Monday (trailer above). A send-up of The Bachelor-esque dating shows, the series is directed by and stars Party Down‘s Ken Marino (it’s written by his wife, Erica Oyama). Produced by Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Productions and distributed by Paramount’s Insurge Pictures, the show will run on Yahoo Screen’s comedy channel, with the first four episodes going live Monday and additional ones going up on Mondays and Thursdays through the summer.

The show boasts big-name guest stars like Kristen Bell, Michael Ian Black and Parks and Recreation’s Adam Scott — comedy all-stars that are easier to get because of the fast-and-loose pace of producing web shows, Marino told Wired.

“They’re short time commitments and everybody wants to do something kind of fun and silly,” Marino said. “One of the nice things about doing something for the internet — webisodes like this — is that it makes people go, ‘Yeah, I want to do that! I have time to do that, let’s get in there and do some fun stuff.'”

It’s all part of the fluid future of media, in which indie content creators and internet giants find their creations battling traditional outlets — and luring away top talent — in an all-out bid to capture viewers.

Marino isn’t the only one coming from traditional media outlets to make TV for the internet. Director Kevin Smith’s Spoilers premieres Monday on Hulu, and the online video hub has already started “airing” its original series Battleground and A Day in the Life.

YouTube’s channels are already populated with content, and even more is coming thanks to $100 million the video site committed to original programming earlier this year. Netflix recently launched its original show Lilyhammer and is planning to launch the Kevin Spacey-starring House of Cards late this year.

Now that more and more people catch up on their television viewing online, it seems only natural that online outlets will fare well with original programming — particularly with something like the much-hyped Netflix reboot of Arrested Development. Eventually, most viewers may not even really bother differentiating between which shows come from traditional networks and which are produced by online entities.

“I watch my 30 Rock episodes on Hulu anyway and I know there are a lot of people like me,” Kevin Smith told Wired in a recent interview. “If I’m one of those cats and open up my Hulu and there’s 30 Rock and right next to it is Spoilers? What do I fucking know? It could be on some channel I’m unaware of. I’m just watching the show and then I’m like, ‘Oh it’s a Hulu original. Go figure.’ There’s fluidity now.”

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